The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Generally, an Ethernet switching device makes decisions for packet forwarding based on a forwarding database. In an example, the forwarding database includes a table storing media access control (MAC) addresses in association with ports of the Ethernet switching device. When the Ethernet switching device receives a packet, the Ethernet switching device extracts a MAC address in a destination field of the packet, and performs a lookup to find a port associated with the MAC address in the table. Then, via the port, the packet is sent out of the Ethernet switching device.